grow black in the face with the vehemence
of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties--a gray smudge of
unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street
merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,--is the
town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of
paving and its scores of acres of wide velvet lawns, with its parks
wherein fountains play, guarded by cannon discarded by the pride of
modern war, with the court-house on the brink of the hill that once
was far west of the town and with twenty-two thousand people whizzing
around in trolleys, rattling about in buggies or scooting down the
shady avenues in motor-cars--whatever the records may show, the real
truth we know; the towns are not the same; the miracle of growth
cannot fool us. And yet here is the miracle in the making. Always in
John Barclay's eyes when he closed them to think of the first years
that followed the war between the states, rose visions of yellow pine
and red bricks and the litter and debris of building; always in his
ears as he remembered those days were the confused noises of wagons
whining and groaning under their heavy loads, of gnawing saws and
rattling hammers, of the clink of trowels on stones, of the swish of
mortar in boxes, and of the murmur of the tide of hurrying feet over
board sidewalks, ebbing and flowing night and morning. In those days
new boys came to town so rapidly that sometimes John met a boy in
swimming whom he did not know, and, even in 1866, when Ellen and Molly
Culpepper were giving a birthday party for Ellen, she declared that
she "simply couldn't have all the new people there."

And so in the sixties the boy and the town went through their raw,
gawky, ugly adolescence together. As streets formed in the town, ideas
took shape in the boy's mind. As Lincoln Avenue was marked out on the
hill, where afterward the quality of the town came to live, so in the
boy's heart books that told him of the world outlined vague visions.
Boy fashion he wrote to Bob Hendricks once or twice a month or a
season, as the spirit moved him, and measured everything with the eyes
of his absent friend. For he came to idealize Bob, who was out in the
wonderful world, and their letters in those days were curious
compositions--full of adventures by field and wood, and awkward
references to proper books to read, and cures for cramps and bashfully
expressed aspirations of the soul. Bob's